On 35th Anniversary of Diplomatic Ties With U.S., China Tries to Soften Image

With tensions between China and the United States growing over a range of political and economic issues, the Chinese government is using the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations this year as part of an intensified effort to soften its image.

Combining the anniversary with the Chinese New Year, which began on Friday, China has moved to expand friendly cultural exchanges with the United States and promote a series of prominent collaborations in music, dance and education, particularly in New York.

The effort, an acknowledged priority of China’s ruling Communist Party, partly reflects what both countries regard as a deepening intertwined relationship between the world’s two leading economic powers, which hardly seemed possible when embassies were formally established on Jan. 1, 1979.

But it also comes against a backdrop of rising mistrust of China among Americans who see it as an economic and military threat. A surge of Chinese investments in American holdings, ranging from Treasury debt to commercial real estate, coupled with frictions that have accompanied China’s rapid expansion and assertiveness toward its Asian neighbors, are viewed as part of the reason.

A poll released by Pew Research earlier this week found that just 33 percent of the American public has a favorable view of China, compared with 51 percent in 2011.

“The Chinese are looking for a much more rounded image that they feel they deserve,” said Shirley Young, an American of Chinese descent and chairwoman of the U.S.-China Cultural Institute, a New York-based group that has been helping to advise and organize China’s new cultural exchange outreach. In some ways, she said in an interview on Friday, “we are still strangers to each other.”

Ms. Young, a business consultant and former executive at General Motors who helped the company’s expansion into China starting in the late 1980s, said that the 35th anniversary of relations provided a useful reminder of just how close both countries have become.

Nowhere are the consequences more visible than in New York, home to one of the largest populations in the Chinese diaspora, where the 35th anniversary has been combined with the advent of Chinese New Year celebrations this weekend. Historically a spectacle confined to New York’s Chinatown communities, the Chinese New Year — this is the Year of the Horse — has been promoted throughout the city.

Chinese diplomats including the ambassador, Cui Tiankai, were invited to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Jan. 6. Earlier this week China’s consul general in New York, Sun Guoxiang, flipped the switch for the Empire State Building’s Chinese New Year lights.

The most notable event is a New Year concert on Saturday by the New York Philharmonic at its Lincoln Center home, conducted by Long Yu, director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The program will present Chinese classical music to an American audience of the cultural elite. The Lincoln Center event also includes an outdoor performance by 75 children of New York’s National Dance Institute, which has a growing educational exchange program in China.

For the New York Philharmonic, the performance is an expansion of a collaboration with the Shanghai Symphony that began a few years ago and reflects a view in the classical music world that China will be its savior, with at least 40 million aspiring musicians and enthusiastic audiences who are mostly young.

Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, said the Chinese government viewed such cultural exchanges as “low-hanging fruit” that strengthens relations despite political disagreements.

“This is sort of an expanding area of U.S.-China relations,” she said. “And the Chinese very much want to have a stable relationship with us. It does worry them when Americans are shown in polls to be less positive on China.”

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Robert A. Kapp is senior advisor to the China Program at the Carter Center. He has been principal of Robert A. Kapp and Associates, a business consulting firm, since 2004. From 1994 through 2004 he served as President of the United States-China Business Council…